I've just now started reading and seeing a lot of Sowell. I saw an interview with him on fox a couple months ago, I was very impressed.

Jan 24, 2006
by Thomas Sowell ( bio | archive | contact )

The Jack Abramoff scandal has put political corruption front and center in Washington but this particular scandal, or even this particular kind of scandal, barely scratches the surface of corruption in government.

It is not that all members of Congress, or even most members of Congress, are taking outright bribes. Government is corrupted whenever it is diverted from its avowed purpose and directed toward some other goal, especially goals that conflict with its purpose.

This more general kind of corruption is much bigger than a few bribes and has far weightier consequences. Staggering as it is to think of the trillions of dollars in runaway spending by the federal government, that is just part of the story.

There are still more trillions of dollars being promised in Social Security pensions and Medicare payments, for which there is not enough money in the till. It is like writing checks without enough money in the bank to redeem them.

Present members of Congress win votes by promising such goodies. That leaves it up to future members of Congress to figure out how to welsh on those promises, which could not be met without jacking up tax rates to unprecedented levels.

Even that probably wouldn't provide enough money, since confiscatory tax rates confiscate the incentives needed to keep the economy going. An alternative political ploy would be to pay people the amount of money that was promised but in dollars so inflated that they won't buy anything close to what dollars bought when they were paid into the Social Security system.

Getting millions of people to rely on pensions that are not going to be there is corrupting government on a scale that makes bribing a few Congressmen look like minor league stuff.

Misuse of the powers of government is widespread at every level of government.

Confiscating homes for which people have worked and sacrificed for a lifetime, in order to turn the property over to someone else who is expected to pay more taxes, is a corruption of the power of eminent domain, which was put there to enable government to do things like build a dam or highway to benefit everyone.

In Burbank, California, the local politicians forced Home Depot to build a little shelter in which illegal aliens can wait to be picked up for work as day laborers -- for other people. The power to grant or withhold building permits was another power meant to be exercised for the public good, not to impose arbitrary extortions. But that kind of corruption is common in many communities.

What can be done about such corruption?

Some people think we need higher standards of behavior among public officials and/or stricter scrutiny by voters. Both would of course be wonderful, if they happened. But what are we to do in the meantime -- say, the next few centuries or the next millennium?

Anyone familiar with ancient history knows that people have been the way they are for thousands of years. Do not look for a change in human nature in 2006.

What we can change are the incentives and constraints.

At the heart of much government corruption is one simple thing: Re-election. It takes big bucks to run a political campaign and all that most politicians have to sell is the power of government that they control. That is what they do sell in various ways to various special interests.

Term limits try to deal with the problem of re-election but the fatal weakness of term limits is the "s" at the end of the word "limits." So long as there are multiple terms, the first term is going to be spent trying to get re-elected to a second term -- instead of devoting that time to serving the public interest.

What really needs to be done is to put a limit of one term in one office and a waiting period of several years before being elected or appointed to another office in government. In other words, make political careers impossible.

Can people who are not career politicians run the government? People who were not career politicians created the government and the Constitution of the United States of America.

It was one of the most incredible achievements in history. Who among our career politicians today would be capable of such a feat?

Thomas Sowell is the prolific author of books such as Black Rednecks and White Liberals and Applied Economics.

Going to *bump* this post of Stephanie's. It's complex, but this may simplify it somewhat. At the same time, it highlights one of my personal 'cognitive dissonance issues', the fact the over the years, Richard Nixon has become for me one of the best, while perhaps worst presidents of all time:

Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Jack Abramoff. Once the hunt's on, some names sound to the scandal born. Tongsun Park, Charles Keating, Elizabeth Ray, Fannie Fox, Susan McDougal. Now comes Jack, the central figure in what Beltway Democrats are trying to build into a bonfire that will burn down Republican control of Congress. Every time someone tells Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid that he, too, took money from Jack's clients, he starts jumping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin yelling, "This is a Republican scandal!" Harry Reid, Harry Reid. One could get used to that.

Poll after poll says the public thinks both parties are equally corrupt. It depends, of course, on what the meaning of corruption is. If by corrupt you mean lobbyist sleaze, quid pro quo, the pork barrel, earmarks to nowhere and grossing out even the public's generally low expectations, then yes, both parties are equally corrupt.

But it gets worse. Congress legislated the system that now exists. Congress planted the seeds back in the '70s for what is revolting you now with two enactments--the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the 1974 amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971. Both were marketed as reforms.

The first law turned political Washington into a trillion-dollar industry camouflaged as the federal budget. The second ensured that sitting members of Congress and K Street lobbyists would become the entrenched management of that industry. Compared to this, Enron is a kindergarten game.

This is a history worth knowing and retelling. It all came to life amid another famous scandal, Watergate, and the most famous such name of all, Richard Nixon.

Nixon's impeachment is wholly linked in history to the Watergate scandal. But in fact, his battles with the Democratically controlled Congress over spending authority also greased his fall. As had Presidents Truman, Kennedy and Johnson, Nixon tried to control Congress's spending by "impounding"--refusing to spend--specific appropriations.

Congress itself had tried various gimmicks to stanch the Great Society's costs, such as "spending ceilings." None worked, as indeed no gaggle of legislators will discipline themselves. Nixon resorted to the blunt club of impoundments. Congress went bananas. This battle, fought inside the partisan cauldron of the Vietnam War, led to the oddly named 1974 Budget Control Act, which purposely eviscerated presidential control over individual spending items, such as an earmark. To kill a "bridge to nowhere," a president has to veto the entire highway bill. Ditto defense pork and so on.

The 1974 act did give the president "rescission" authority--a request not to spend money on a project. But the law also said that if Congress never took a vote to affirm the rescission, the money went out the door. Absurd, but that's current law. Congressional Quarterly, in a 1982 study of the struggle over spending control, quoted a budget official then predicting the future: "What we're talking about here is congressional government--and chaos."

But they weren't done. In 1974--the start the Long Era of Chaos in our politics--Congress claimed it was curing the abuses of Watergate by mandating that no individual could contribute more than $1,000 to a candidate per election. So of course candidates were going to need a lot of "individual" contributions to finance a modern campaign. Thus was born the current co-dependency between members of Congress who hold the power to confer federal spending and Washington lobbyists who have the power to bundle campaign contributions in PACs and such for incumbent earmarkers.

A friend who was part of this world back then described it for me recently: "If you lived in Washington in those years, the change was dramatic. We moved to California in 1973. Returning to visit in 1976, the evening landscape had changed completely. There were fund-raisers everywhere. Friends who were congressmen were stopping at two or three cocktail parties an evening, touching base with single-subject organizations who had established PACs in reply to the 1974 reforms. We knew a caterer; her life had changed." Her business today is probably a publicly traded company, so vast has the industry of Beltway spending and campaign-contribution collecting become. Washington today is enervated by it.

Fixes are possible. Put simply, reverse the "reforms" of 1974.

Abolish the individual limits on campaign contributions but require public disclosure on the Web. Democrats James Carville and Paul Begala recently proposed making this the basis of creating a new campaign-finance system. But beyond this lies the question of whether Democrats and Republicans want to fix Washington. Are they really separate parties, or just one entity--the Beltway Party?

I don't see how the Democrats have any practical or ideological incentive to stop the federal government's inexorable 70-year-long growth. This is what they want--more. For them, the Abramoffs of the world are reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh. By contrast, the Blunt-Boehner-Shadegg fight for the House leadership is an ideological argument over what Republicans should be amid a federal establishment that metastasized after the 1974 changes.

The failed 1974 Budget Act, which released the earmark and spending ghouls, makes clear that some workable form of presidential spending control has to be in the game. Presidential line-item veto power would require a constitutional amendment. Real rescission authority would help, but that has to pass through Congress and maybe a court challenge. Oh gosh, I almost forgot. Unlike from 1960 to 1994, the Republicans control Congress, and arguably all three branches of government. Does that matter? We'll find out this November and in 2008, when Republicans will either vote or sit.

I wish President Bush would put this issue of what Washington has become into his State of the Union speech Tuesday. My guess is he won't, recalling what happened when Richard Nixon tried to fight both a major war and the party that controls Congress, which for the foreseeable future looks like it will be the Beltway Spend and Collect Party.

Click to expand...

BTW did you know that it was Nixon that first put forward the idea that the 'people in the projects' would become more drawn into the middle class/mainstream society if they were allowed to 'work' their way towards ownership of the projects?

Put these together with what he did towards opening China and India, shoot!

Useful Searches

About USMessageBoard.com

USMessageBoard.com was founded in 2003 with the intent of allowing all voices to be heard. With a wildly diverse community from all sides of the political spectrum, USMessageBoard.com continues to build on that tradition. We welcome everyone despite political and/or religious beliefs, and we continue to encourage the right to free speech.

Come on in and join the discussion. Thank you for stopping by USMessageBoard.com!